I am a leader by default, because nature abhors a vacuum. (Desmond Tutu)

September 30, 2011

Delicious, "mangled by carpetbaggers"

Once upon a time it was del.icio.us, and it was the new cool way to use bookmarks and tagging, and I used it all the time. I put more than 10,000 bookmarks into the system. This was when Flickr was on the top of the world and before Facebook and Twitter had made much of a dent.

Del.icio.us turned into delicious.com, got bought by Yahoo. Some cool people started to work there supporting it. Yahoo gave it a loving embrace, and those cool people left to do other cool things. They warned me on their way out, and I moved my 10,000 bookmarks to pinboard and mostly stopped using both systems because I wasn't ready to invest heavily in something that other people didn't trust.

Yahoo sold delicious.com to the founders of Youtube, who now run a company called AVOS. By all accounts the transition hasn't gone very well, e.g. your most loyal users say that the system has been mangled by carpetbaggers. From Violet Blue on ZDNet:

When Yahoo! got caught with its finger on the trigger to kill Delicious, an amazing cry came up from the internets to save it. Then AVOS rode in on a white unicorn to save it. Yay!

But, no. What we got was our worst fears about the bubble, confirmed.

Delicious is a bitter lesson for everyone. It’s the difference between how people actually use a product versus how rich, out-of-touch knuckleheads think people should be using that product, all to further their own self-interests.

If you make a startup we like, such as Delicious: please don’t sell it.

Pinboard has been doing well, but it's a one-person show with a very modest balance sheet.

I don't really know what to conclude about this phase of network history, other than to note that the anti-internet texts of the 1990s provide some small measure of solace, and that if you want to keep something that you find on the net in order to find it again making a copy of it in addition to bookmarking it is appopriate.